Bay 12 Games Forum
Other Projects => Curses => Topic started by: Jetman123 on September 18, 2008, 06:31:43 pm
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As I mentioned in another topic, it would be very neat to be able to assassinate conservative members of the Supreme Court, stage a raid on the Supreme Court location and recover sensitive documents to get public opinion to swing against them (I hate the Supreme court sometimes - should be easier to get them out of office)
Assassinations:
First of all, assassinating someone is a very big risk. If the figure is popular, there's going to be public backlash. If it's someone REALLY important, like the President, you might end up getting riots before the police even raid your safehouse.
If nobody knows you did it, though, the figure is merely eliminated. The mourning has no effect on your popularity, and there's one more Conservative down.
Perhaps you could also then have a sleeper of yours run for his position, replacing him with a Liberal or Elite Liberal depending on Heart.
There is a way to avoid the risk. You must first debase that politician or other important figure, and make him unpopular in the public eye. Then people actually might cheer your assassin or your group on for doing it. You can do this via rallying, liberal disobedience, and to a much more extreme extent publishing incriminating photographs or writing about them to the Guardian. It takes time, though. The advantage would naturally be that the replacement is almost definitely going to be Liberal, or at least better on the scale than the previous one.
Assassination would depend on stealth skill and weapon skill, as well as the weapon equipped. I also reccomend having a special scoped rifle available for assassinations, which costs quite a bit and must be bought illegally, but is not neccessary. It merely ups your chances - shooting someone from a distance is undoubtedly much easier than walking up to them and shooting them with a handgun, or trying to strangle them in the midst of their security, and much better for your chances at escape.
You would not play out the assassination, merely have it ordered.
Alternately you could of course go the regular LCS approach and bust in with SMGs, shotguns and body armor and kill every Conservative there, but there should be a stealthier option.
I do want to see political members being able to be killed whether through direct violence or assassination. Some way to get rid of them. It would of course obey the rules above - popular figure means public backlash towards you. And going the overt route means that pretty much everyone WILL know it was you.
The Supreme Court
Right now, the Supreme court is almost untouchable. I have had everyone else at elite liberal, yet the Court is 99% of the time full of Conservatives. It takes too long to replace and public opinion doesn't seem to affect it enough. There should be a way to de-popularize court members, whether through documents, defamation, or simply walking in and blowing their brains out.
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There's already an endgame event (at least on the SVN) where Congress can amend the Constitution to remove conservatives from the Supreme Court if necessary. Assassination is cool and thematic but any realistic portrayal would be rather unnecessarily difficult in comparison with that.
Additionally, I really don't think anything as significant as an assassination should come be handled without user input. It wouldn't be impossible to create a special assassination sitemode with extra-strict security measures and rules, such as characters who are capable of passing an extra-difficult perception check to spot weapons hidden under clothing and automatic alarms and evacuation of the target creature if you just walk in carrying weapons openly.
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hmm, perhaps.
I am aware of that, but it takes a ridiculously long time when the Supreme Court seems to be huddled away in their own island of the world ruling on court cases and taking my laws from L+ to L. It's annoying, and it's just a waste of time in the end-game.
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This would be an awesome way to get a president out of office!
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It's pretty easy to put an Elite Liberal President to office already. Assasination system will be just a needless work. The Supreme Court, on the other hand...
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Man, when I saw this thread I was thinking if the FBI used google to find terrorists we'd be fucked.
jk FBI, this is only a game! :-*
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Man, when I saw this thread I was thinking if the FBI used google to find terrorists we'd be fucked.
jk FBI, this is only a game! :-*
Or CIA. Or Mossad. M16.
I can picture the conversation
DFplayer:Sir, we aren't terrorist.
CIA/FBI: Oh yeah? That software of yours is used for terror purpose, right? It has alphabet everywhere.
[continued... by yourself. The Power of Open Source]
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As long as you don't make threats, you'll be fine. Nothing here gets close to that Death of a President BS movie.
I have to argue that no assassination should be treated as popular in a setting like LCS, no matter the rating of the fellow in office. It is an extreme act that undermines the Left's hold on democratic action, and it alienates friends and foes who realize that nothing is off the table. Oliver Stone can make as many movies as he wants, but conservatives weren't cheering when JFK was killed.
If actions like assassination are included, and I believe they should be in, there could only be the most dire consequences in store for the LCS, and any ideological allies in elective office. If C and C+, and let's face it, L and M candidates are not safe in public, then the conservative menace will be gunning down labor leaders and popular L+ folks a la central america.
It is a genie in a bottle and should be treated as such.
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As long as you don't make threats, you'll be fine. Nothing here gets close to that Death of a President BS movie.
I have to argue that no assassination should be treated as popular in a setting like LCS, no matter the rating of the fellow in office. It is an extreme act that undermines the Left's hold on democratic action, and it alienates friends and foes who realize that nothing is off the table. Oliver Stone can make as many movies as he wants, but conservatives weren't cheering when JFK was killed.
If actions like assassination are included, and I believe they should be in, there could only be the most dire consequences in store for the LCS, and any ideological allies in elective office. If C and C+, and let's face it, L and M candidates are not safe in public, then the conservative menace will be gunning down labor leaders and popular L+ folks a la central america.
It is a genie in a bottle and should be treated as such.
Your argument would work well if LCS was a simulation, but it's not, it's a satirical game with many wide deviations from reality. No great effort should be made to include assassination if it isn't implemented in a way that could be useful for a player. It would be much better to implement an assassination mechanic such that a player might find it useful, since that increases the play variety. I suspect that your argument is based on a desire to censor the game rather than improve it.
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Traditionally, games that have assassination options balance them as being extremely risky, on two fronts: 1) Assassination attempts have a fairly low probability of success, and 2) If it gets out that you did it, there's a tremendous backlash. This presupposes that you can "get away with it" -- so, maybe it's bad if "the LCS" assassinates someone, but not as bad if "some rogue gunman" does it.
The SLA are best known for kidnapping and brainwashing Patty Hearst, and for the SWAT siege in which most of their members were killed, but their "burst onto the scene" action was the assassination of the local school superintendent with cyanide bullets. Public reaction was indeed pretty negative.
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Maybe it would be better to just be able to run into a Supreme Court Judge someplace with VEEEERYY LOW Probability (Id say 1/500 raids or so) and from there on decide what to do... persuasion, kidnapping or murder.
Im against President Killing... The vicepresident must be just as Conservative is... and besides is no fun to do it the fast way, we need elections!
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Killing the President would make more sense if he wasn't truely elected to power.
Given that Presidents are elected by the people... and Supreme court Judges are not... I am not sure if the LCS would do so especially since it wouldn't do anything unless the Vice President was Liberal (which he wouldn't be)
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The satisfaction of assassinating presidential-level conservative scum shouldn't be overlooked as an advantage.
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Well then how about this...
You assasinate the president... and replace him secretly with a puppet.
I think assasinating the Shadow President would be better!
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Your argument would work well if LCS was a simulation, but it's not, it's a satirical game with many wide deviations from reality. No great effort should be made to include assassination if it isn't implemented in a way that could be useful for a player. It would be much better to implement an assassination mechanic such that a player might find it useful, since that increases the play variety. I suspect that your argument is based on a desire to censor the game rather than improve it.
You need big consequences in game for a big cross over the line like that, I am not saying the tactic should not be implemnted. It is easy enough to change public opinion, it is just time consuming to wait for appointments. I want to see a whole system of government fail because you keep rolling on judges and presidents. Assassination should not be like drowning nobles in DF! There should be serious consequences.
And Censorship? gimme a break.
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Assassination is rather rare and hard to pull off and quite frankly not too funny. Scandal on the other hand is common as dirt and freaking hilarious at times. How about instead of killing politicians, you can specifically target them to dig up dirt, thus removing them from the politosphere.
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The above suggestion is brilliant! Obviously it would cost a lot of money, and possibly require high computer skill (photoshop + tabloids), but that seems like a far more viable option for the Liberal Cause. The question is how it would be implemented as a whole.
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You need big consequences in game for a big cross over the line like that, I am not saying the tactic should not be implemnted. It is easy enough to change public opinion, it is just time consuming to wait for appointments. I want to see a whole system of government fail because you keep rolling on judges and presidents. Assassination should not be like drowning nobles in DF! There should be serious consequences.
And Censorship? gimme a break.
Assassinations are supposed to be difficult. If they're difficult and ineffective, most players will ignore them and the work that went into implementing them would be a complete waste. Therefore, assassinations either should not be implemented, or should be implemented in such a way that they are actually worth using under certain conditions.
I'm not convinced that you oppose them for reasons other than censorship, given that your own argument against them is that they "cross the line."
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Thats what we need. Character assassination. Instead of shooting the Arch Conservative Justice you have him end up in bed with an underage black prostitute.
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Personally, I think fabricating (or digging up) scandals to take out political targets is an awesome idea. It could also add more uses to some of the less used skills.
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Maybe there could be something like a "Scandal-making" part on the job menu with the subcategories "Detective-work" and "Fabrication"?
Detective-work could require street-sense, high perception and intelligence, stealth, disguise, security, sleight of hand and quite possibly computer-skill (driving too, if detective-work involves tailing suspects to and fro places). Obviously some of these would have to be filtered out, but it would be nice if it was difficult to dig up dirt on people, as they would cover their tracks pretty well in real life.
Fabrication would mostly involve computers, writing and persuasion, I'd say. It should be less believable than detective-work, but be easier to do. Maybe have a few different types of fabrication? Low, medium and high quality fabrications, where the rate of success requires higher skills the better quality, and the quality determines how believable the fabrication is.
My concept might be hard to implement/silly though, and would pretty much eradicate the necessity of violence for effective counteraction of the Conservative Agenda once enough recruits are trained.
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It's good that you should be able to be non-violent, and just able to do scandels. The public would approve of you more once JSF adds in public disapproval of violence.
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About the "detective work"/"fabrication" :
In the detective work, you could find some events in the life of your targets, ranging from nothing causing problems, to scandalous stuff.
Then you could pick one mildly scandalous stuff, and fabricate some story around it.
Of course the scandal could be related to an issue. The more the population is conservative on that issue, the bigger the impact.
Example :
real event - Senator Johnson, loves the US flag. So much that he is wearing a T-Shirt with it. But it got old, and his wife used it to clean dust at home.
A bit of fabrication - Not only the Senator has no consideration for the flag, but he is a liar. The population of his town have always been impressed by the number of new flag he bought. Far too many ! We recently discovered that far from being a sign of respect, he bought them specially to spoil them. (And now some fake evidence of a new flags, full of oil and dirt, found in his bin. And add the real T-shirt (with a picture of him), cut and covered with dust).
Of course, burning flags, should not be well considered ot have an impact.
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You could also try to find those who knew the person and turn them into sleepers such as his Wife while she goes to a beautique.
Or kidnap the man who writes his speaches and trick him into writing the prez bad speaches or something.
Or just torchure them for info... whatever
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I for one have never understood how flag underwear is tolerated but burning a flag, which by the way is the ONLY legal way to dispose of a flag that has been worn beyond use(might have changed with nylon flags but not sure), is a crime.
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That flag burning idea is spot on, IMHO, perfect balance of absurdity and political relevence.
Could there be a politicians house site, like there's a CEO's site? Then you could raid the site for scandal evidence. Of course, killing anyone on site should be a Bad Thing unless the scandal is very serious (which might happen in C+ political conditions) because then there's too much sympathy.
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Another note: character assassination should ONLY have the effect of making THAT SPECIFIC politician go down. It won't necessarily change the public opinion, so if the public are conservative, the politician should be replaced by a new conservative, and your efforts are for nothing. The scandal should be when a specific individual needs to be taken out.
It should also be usable on the supreme court... but take a lot of effort, as it needs to outrage the populous enough to get them to make the congress force the guy out.
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It won't necessarily change the public opinion
It really depends how you go around doing it. A lot of the time people play the "Villain" so that people will be swayed to the other side.
If you really desmirched the President who is considered to be the pinacle of the concervative power... It could be just enough to sway some people into going Liberal. (of course I guess it could work EXCELLENTLY in a presidential election if you want a temporary 4 year Liberal President)
Though I do agree that it shouldn't be a wave of a magic wand and suddenly transform the country Liberal.
Here is something: How about protecting Conservative Presidents from the Conservative Crime Squad? Remember JFK? The second he died the Vice President basically had the unlimited support of the people.
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Lyndon Johnson hardly had unlimited support. In his first term he was the champion of popular programs like integration and won re-election by the widest margin in 140 years. By the end of his second term, he was seen as the champion of Vietnam and was far less popular and would probably have lost had he run. His support was no more solid then any politicians.
But perhaps the vice president wouldn't have to be the same political ideology as the president. Right now for example we have McCain as a C and Palin as a definate C+. The LCS would in theory want to protect McCain from the CCS who'd prefer Palin.
If a candidate is forced from office by scandal, there would need to be a special election, but the opposition candidate should have an advantage because the disgrace would taint the party as well as candidate.
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Maybe you can cause the scandel itself as well.
I recruit a Prostitute, and use her to start an affair with a SC Judge?
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Lyndon Johnson hardly had unlimited support
He did in a few key issues within the immediate future mostly by using JFK as a justification.
If the Conservatives want to pass a law, then using the assasination of a president would be a good way to go around doing it.
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What if in the game you had the option of making it look like an accident? Or possibly even framing someone else (the CCS?) for it?
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What, you think people would believe the president chocked on a pretzel?
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By the way, framing someone for assasination attempt may be much easier than actual assasination. Just sneak into some Conservative's house, leave there a box of explosives and a picture of the President with a bullseye drawn over it, then call the police... More the better if this Conservative is a CCS member.
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You would need to do a lot more than that to provide a convincing batch of (false) evidence. In game terms, this would probably mean a skill check, perhaps involving Law and Streetsense.
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Well, of course it isn't easy, but to prepare an assasination is easier than to prepare it and carry it out in any case. What I want to say is that framing your enemies for an assasination is more effective than killing some dude and risking public backlash.
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Personally, I like the idea of Presidential Assassinations as an Awesome But Impractical act of waving the enormous penis, on the scale of EVE Online's Titans. (Yes, I know that sounded wrong.) It'll get you a lot of Juice and force the Veep to take over (more usefully: the Speaker of the House if the Veep has been vaped), but mainly, it's there to say "I killed the President and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
Supreme Court Assassinations are, of course, useful.
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Personally, I like the idea of Presidential Assassinations as an Awesome But Impractical act of waving the enormous penis, on the scale of EVE Online's Titans. (Yes, I know that sounded wrong.) It'll get you a lot of Juice and force the Veep to take over (more usefully: the Speaker of the House if the Veep has been vaped), but mainly, it's there to say "I killed the President and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
This is kind of my perspective on the whole Presidential Assassination thing as well. Nearly useless, but still worth including for the sake of getting to say you did it.